When Conservation Minnesota painted a bullseye on the mining industry in northeastern Minnesota, they proved that the DFL wasn’t interested in helping hardworking mining families. These mining families are the most blue collar families in Minnesota.

Twin Cities DFL elites essentially said that their agenda was more important than those families’ livelihood. There’s nothing worse than the DFL’s disinterest in these miners’ livelihoods. The DFL’s anti-mining agenda says that the miners are second class citizens in the DFL.

In St. Louis County, the median household income from 2007-2011 was $45,399. The statewide average during the same time period was $58,476. More importantly, during that same time period, 1 in 6 people in St. Louis County lived below the poverty line compared with 1 in 9 people statewide.

The other thing that’s worth noting is that the DFL’s agenda has focused mostly on 3 things: increasing spending on K-12 and higher education, raising taxes and submitting to everything on the public employee unions’ wish list.

That agenda won’t build a strong private sector economy because it takes money from people who increase Minnesota’s GDP, then transfers that money to the public sector, where too much money is spent on parasites who subtract from Minnesota’s GDP.

Some of the parasites that can be identified are PR staffers in every office, agency, panel, commission and council, ‘government affairs directors’ and the omni-present legislative liaisons. Government affair directors and legislative liaisons is just a different alias for public sector lobbyists.

These parasites get paid with taxpayers’ money to lobby the legislature to steal money from the productive private sector so it can be spent in the unproductive public sector.

Think how much healthier Minnesota’s economy would be if the Twin Metals and PolyMet mining projects took off. They’d create an estimated 1,000 mining jobs. That’s before determining how many mining support jobs they’d create. That’s before thinking about the jobs that would get created in the Iron Range as a result of a strengthened economy. Think, too, of the population boom that’d surely follow.

The Twin Cities DFL is saying with their policies that they aren’t interested in creating those blue collar jobs.

5 Responses to “The DFL: No longer the party of the people, Part II”

I have been reading your blog for some time. I tend to be center-left in my viewpoint but like reading your stuff. I disagree with most of what you write but agree with most of what you write here.

I also think political parties are what is wrong with this state and this country. Neither party has the people’s best interest at hand and neither party cares about the state or federal Constitution. All political parties do is create distrust of citizens.

Our forefathers hated political parties.

“The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”
– George Washington

“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party …….. where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
– Thomas Jefferson

Mining isn’t the only industry facing extinction here in MN. Affordable reliable energy is on it’s way out. Primarily coal. Instead of forming common sense laws with proper time lines for implementation, we have shut the door on coal and nuclear power. Solar and wind now are the wants of the metro green Dflers. Sadly though both are heavily subsidized by tax payers dollars and very costly to build. Both of which are unreliable Solar can’t be stored and the lead given off isn’t so clean. I would like to add they both need to be backed up by either coal or gas fired boilers.

Let’s take a moment and think about the thousands of living wage jobs we are turning away and the great impact these jobs would have on the local economy’s of the state. Instead let’s do away with energy jobs and implement radical laws such as regional haze, and the EPA’s heat number that no coal fired boiler will ever reach. We need to wake up and realize that pollution and the consumption of fossil fuels is a global issue. Until we get the great polluters to get on board we only lose.

Neither party has acquitted itself well, recently, in DC in particular. Obama allying with the wealth-GOP as usual, liberal-progressives and Tea Party being cast adrift w/o the powerful caring whether either be put into a sound boat, made to share a boat, or simply cast naked into cold waters. Nobody liked that deal cutting theater show better than K-Street. Single digit approval percentages were earned. There seems no answer because, it appears, divide and conquer works so pleasantly for the few who drive the engine of the train. Who captian the ship, choose your metaphor. Geithner and Bernanke belong to the same country club., Gary, neither of us will ever be asked to join. If asked, neither of us could afford membership fees. Go figure.

Just exactly what planet do you live on? If Obama allied himself with wealth GOP he would’ve worked out a bill that lowered rates with fewer deductions (aka Romney’s plan).

We had great economic growth and tax growth in the late 1980’s with the top rate being just 28%. If Obama really wanted revenue why not go back to those rates. Oh that will be admitting that lower tax rates on the rich generates economic growth and tax revenues for the government.

Obama’s idea of fairness is raising the rate. Not the dollar amount that it generates.